Graduates boo tech CEOs praising AI at commencement speeches as job anxiety deepens

In desperate times, graduates find hope in humiliating tech CEOs

University graduates are booing and heckling corporate executives who praise AI during their commencement ceremonies, and the only people who seem to be genuinely surprised by this are the executives themselves. In a procession of viral videos, 2026 commencement speakers like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt face loud and sustained jeers from students after praising AI and describing the technology as both inevitable and mandatory. The videos have clearly struck a chord among young people entering a bleak job market in an increasingly unstable world. "They deserve everything they're getting," Penny Oliver, who recently graduated with a political science degree from George Mason University, told The Verge. "Some would argue they're getting off kind of lightly. I'm not saying they deserve to get hurt, but it just shows a level of arrogance and a disconnect when you see that." Schmidt was met with a chorus of boos at the University of Arizona last week while lecturing graduates to accept the technology as part of their futures. "When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask which seat. You just get on," Schmidt told the room of angry graduates. The reason for the outrage should have been obvious. As journalist Marisa Kabas put it, "these young people have already been forced onto the ship and there aren't enough seats." The week before, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at a property development company, expressed shock after receiving a similarly icy reception from arts and humanities students at the University of Central Florida, where she described AI as "the next industrial revolution." At Middle Tennessee State University, Scott Borchetta, a music industry CEO known for helping launch Taylor Swift's career, gave a boisterous and patronizing speech mocking AI hecklers and telling students critical of AI to simply "deal with it." And with graduation season ongoing and the online videos bringing anti-AI sentiment to a boiling point, it's likely these incidents won't be the last. "Of course people are going to be mad and of course they're going to boo. Why shouldn't they?" said Oliver. "They just spent tens of thousands of dollars on an education that is supposed to get them more opportunities, and here comes this guy [Schmidt] who could never work another day in his life and still be very comfortable and well-off saying 'Hey, you should really get on the bandwagon of this technology that's going to replace you.'" For many graduates, the surprised and contentious reactions of the speakers reveal a massive disconnect between the tech evangelists aggressively pushing AI and the young people being left to deal with its many well-documented consequences, which threaten everything from the environment to our critical thinking skills. Young people seem to particularly despise the attitude on display: Not only do you have to accept this technology we created that is the cause of your existential dread and rapidly evaporating job prospects, the speakers seem to say, but you also have to like it. "It demonstrates a complete lack of being in touch with real people, and also it does not surprise me," Austin Burkett, a game designer who recently graduated with an MFA at the NYU Game Center, told The Verge. Burkett is one of the lucky ones. Before graduation, he found a job working on Pocket Bard, a mobile app used by tabletop roleplaying gamers, who tend to be staunchly anti-AI. But he says that some of his former classmates have been forced to take on fleeting gig work training the AI models that are replacing them, and that graduates are right to be incensed at corporate executives with a smirking "adopt-or-die" attitude on the technology. "These are not the people who have to worry about rent, and they're not the people who have to worry about their job being replaced," Burkett added. "The people who are saying 'it's just a tool' are the ones who can afford to say that. It puts the blame on the individual, and puts forth this myth that these institutions and systems and companies have no ulterior motive and no reasons to make a profit." To be fair, student receptions to commencement speakers promoting AI often vary depending on the majors of those in the audience. The strongest reactions seen in viral videos have come mainly from liberal arts and humanities students. Many of those graduates include students hoping to enter creative professions that are facing existential threats thanks to generative AI tools. At CalArts, President Ravi Rajan was booed off stage by graduates of the legendary California art school, which is well known as an incubator for talent in the animation industry. Rajan has faced heavy criticism after eliminating creative programs and pushing AI adoption at the university through corporate partnerships with tech companies. The student anger is coming to a head at a time when young people in most fields face intense pressure from the tech and business world to adopt generative AI tools -- even as employers use those same tools to justify hiring freezes and mass layoffs. While polling shows that students and Gen Z are some of the most frequent users of AI tools, they are also extremely skeptical of Silicon Valley and have become some of the technology's biggest critics. That's not a surprise considering that young people are regularly witnessing the technology's failure to deliver on its most basic promises. At a commencement ceremony for Glendale Community College in Arizona, the room swelled with angry boos after the college president revealed that the school's new AI system had failed to read out more than half the students' names as they walked onstage to receive their diplomas. And earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a major nonfiction book by author Steven Rosenbaum about truth in the age of AI contained numerous fake or misattributed quotes hallucinated by AI tools. "Society is in the process of restructuring itself around a tool that simply doesn't work," writer Margaret Killjoy wrote this week in response to the incidents. "If you needed to build a bridge, you wouldn't hire a structural engineer who gets it right about 70% of the time. You wouldn't read a history book that is 30% fiction but doesn't tell you what 30%." It would be a mistake to ignore that much of the anger young people are expressing against AI is flowing through tech platforms that incentivize engagement metrics and short-lived cycles of paralyzing rage. Viral videos may be cathartic and a great way to unite lots of people, but graduates like Oliver seem to be well aware that doesn't translate to material change unless people step up and take action. "I definitely think there's a catharsis in it, especially at a time where it feels like there are never any consequences for rich people, ever," said Oliver about the much-talked-about viral videos. "I think it's possible to take this outrage and channel it toward something impactful, but it doesn't just spring up. People have to get together and say 'let's do something.'" One tangible example is the massive movement that has sprung up around the country to oppose the construction of AI data centers. According to a recent Gallup poll, seven out of 10 Americans now say they oppose building these facilities in their local area, and nearly half of all proposed data center projects have either been scrapped or delayed this year. The unprecedented energy demands and environmental threats imposed by data centers have created a network of physical rallying points for those opposing the tech world's multitrillion-dollar AI excess, and some graduates are encouraged by the role young people have played in the fight. "I think despite the urge to feel nihilistic about it, I do have a decent glimmer of hope, inspired by people my age and younger," said Burkett, mentioning a theater production written by high school students who were motivated by the environmental problems caused by AI. "It's inspiring to see that it's not just people who have had this privilege to go through an undergraduate or graduate degree, but the youth who are coming up and feel very strongly about this."

The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks

From campus ceremonies to Linux communities and academic journals, resistance to LLM evangelism is getting louder It's exam and graduation time in the academic year, and some students are making their anti-AI feelings heard. It's not the only place. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at the University of Arizona on Sunday, and his line "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence" was met with a loud chorus of boos and jeering, as The Guardian reports. Not for the first time: last week, students at the University of Central Florida also booed real estate executive Gloria Caulfield for calling AI "the next industrial revolution." NBC's report on Schmidt's speech has a video clip that includes both reactions, as well as a similarly negative reception to pro-AI remarks by record producer Scott Borchetta, giving another commencement speech at Middle Tennessee State University. Borchetta is the boss of Big Machine, the former label of Taylor Swift, whose six-year battle with the company has its own compendious Wikipedia article. As no stranger to controversy, Schmidt is probably not too worried. The Register reported on him blaming working from home for Google's stumbles in the AI race in 2024. However, it's notable that these captains of industry appear surprised by anti-AI sentiment. Granted, this vulture is an arch-skeptic in this matter, but we are noticing increasing levels of resistance and pushback against the rise of LLM bots. Earlier this month, we reported that both Fedora and Ubuntu were planning to include more AI. Since then, there has been sufficient negative sentiment from the Fedora community that the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative community initiative proposal, approved at the start of May, is now blocked by two "-1" votes. One of these is from Justin Wheeler, who, as we noted, wrote a blog post about Fedora's AI-Assisted Contributions Policy. He and Red Hatter Miro Hrončok both changed their votes. Other examples of recent writing about the changing positions on AI that we've seen in the software development world include "I don't think AI will make your processes go faster," and a long and thoughtful piece from Baldur Bjarnason called "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born."

The AI bots are coming and the young are booing, not applauding

LONDON, May 20 (Reuters) - The AI revolution is here and the boos are getting louder. As artificial intelligence reshapes industries and markets around the world, a sense of dread is deepening among young "digital natives" now entering the workforce, fearful of the impact on jobs and daily life as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini become household names. In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the impact of AI would be "larger, faster, and more consequential" than anything before. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have," he said as boos rang out even as he addressed anxieties about job security and an uncertain future. How real those fears are was on show in an announcement by Standard Chartered (STAN.L), opens new tab on Tuesday that it will cut over 7,000 jobs and replace "lower-value human capital" with AI. Many tech firms are also cutting ⁠staff, citing AI. Meta, which is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to train its AI model, is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce globally starting this month. Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab has axed some 30,000 corporate jobs in recent months as it pushes AI and efficiency, while in February fintech firm Block (XYZ.N), opens new tab cut nearly half its staff. The Iran war is also softening hiring. Schmidt acknowledged the young generation's fears and called them "rational," but just like the current top executives he painted the change and disruption AI was bringing as something inevitable that everyone needed to adapt to. GEN Z: ANGRIER AND MORE ANXIOUS ABOUT AI However, even as CEOs embrace AI, there have been signs of pushback: from Chinese courts, to unions at South Korean carmakers, Hollywood scriptwriters and India's film industry. And perhaps the clearest sign of discomfort with the vision of the world offered by tech companies is the rising discontent among America's ⁠youth. An April report from Gallup showed that a rising number of Generation Z - those born between 1997 and 2012 - were anxious or angry about AI, while those who said they were hopeful or excited by it had fallen sharply compared with a year earlier. Nearly half of respondents said the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, while 15% said it was a net positive, a much bleaker view than a year ago. Most recognized the need to be AI-savvy but ⁠said it hindered deeper learning and creativity. "Negative emotions have intensified over the past year," the report's authors wrote and noted that usage was starting to plateau. "Young adults in the workforce are significantly more likely to view AI as a risk than a benefit." The data did show that positive views of AI increased with ⁠the level of usage and decreased amongst those who used it less. Schmidt's frosty reception followed other recent shows of anger at AI. At the University of Central Florida on May 8, a real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was similarly heckled and booed over a commencement speech on ⁠AI. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," she said as boos rang out, catching her off guard. "What happened? OK, I struck a chord... Only a few years ago AI was not a factor in our lives." The room burst out in cheers. Reporting by Adam Jourdan Editing by Tomasz Janowski Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Adam Jourdan Thomson Reuters Regional bureau chief in South Latin America with previous experience leading corporate news coverage in China and as an independent film director and producer.

Why new grads are booing commencement speakers: There's an 'ambient anxiety that AI is going to make things dramatically worse'

A spate of recent university commencement speakers was met with boos rather than the usual cheers when their remarks turned to the topic of AI. The students' vocal displeasure has brought into focus many Gen Zers' opposition to AI and anxiety around the challenging entry-level job market. Trying to land an entry-level job right now "is like throwing darts to begin with," Sneha Revanur, a 21-year-old senior at Stanford University and the founder and president of AI policy nonprofit Encode AI, tells CNBC Make It. The unemployment rate among recent college graduates, ages 22 to 27, was 5.6% in March, compared to 4.2% among all workers and 3.1% among all college grads, according to data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank. They're facing steeper competition: ZipRecruiter's 2026 grad report observed a 14.9% year-over-year increase in clicks per job posting across all jobs in March, and a 21.7% increase for entry-level jobs. At the same time, entry-level roles made up only 38.6% of overall job postings on ZipRecruiter, the lowest share in at least three years. "I don't think that kids are having a hard time accepting [AI] because we know that AI exists," Madison Fuentes, a recent graduate of the University of Central Florida with a degree in English creative writing, told News 6 in Orlando. "I think we're just having a hard time acknowledging that it's taking away job opportunities from us." Fuentes and Revanur are part of the class of 2026, which saw the launch of ChatGPT early in their freshman year in November 2022 and were the first to have nearly their entire undergraduate education shaped by artificial intelligence during the subsequent generative AI boom. On top of the current job search challenges her class is already experiencing, Revanur says "there definitely is this ambient anxiety that AI is going to make things dramatically worse."

Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

As artificial intelligence casts a shadow over career prospects, it is becoming an unwelcome subject at this season's college commencements. At several campuses, graduates have interrupted speakers with stadium-wide boos when the topic turned to AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced repeated jeers over the weekend during his keynote address to about 10,000 University of Arizona graduates on the rise of AI. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said, as booing began to build in the audience. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt responded as the boos continued. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating ... and I understand that fear." To students the topic felt tone deaf, said Olivia Malone, a 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate bound for law school. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," said Malone. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Similar responses to keynote speakers who touched on AI at other universities highlight a pervasive sense of anxiety among today's college students. Across campuses and in a multitude of recent surveys, students say they are trying to figure out which skills, majors and jobs won't be rendered useless by AI. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. A recent Gallup poll of Generation Z youth and adults, between ages 14 and 29, found increasingly negative attitudes toward AI. About half of Gen Z teens and adults say they use AI daily or weekly. But anger about the technology has increased since a year ago, while excitement and hopefulness about AI is declining. Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during her keynote this month at the University of Central Florida. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said, as boos erupted, to her surprise. She turned around to ask those behind her, "What happened?" "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" said Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Development Company in Orlando. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said, prompting cheers. "And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand," she said to more jeering. A similar response met music executive Scott Borchetta when he spoke to the graduating class of Middle Tennessee State University about how AI is shaping the music industry. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, as the students in caps and gowns booed. "I know it. Deal with it ... Do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops. The advice didn't land well with students like Malone, who said the former Google executive's speech was more self-serving than inspirational. "It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever," said Malone, noting that the choice of Schmidt as keynote speaker had also been controversial because his name appears in the Epstein files. "Everybody I was sitting by was really hooting and hollering about that, yelling, 'Epstein files! Epstein files!'" Part of the backlash from graduating students stems from the dismal job market they're entering. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years. Sami Wargo just graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where an AI expert was the undergraduate commencement speaker despite a student petition demanding that the school find someone else. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," said Wargo, who majored in digital media and minored in advertising. Chris Duffey, an AI evangelist at Adobe who recently used AI to "co-author" a book titled "Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence," took the stage anyway. "Innovation," he told the students, "will reveal what can be done, but only you can decide what should be done." Wargo said she joined other students around her in booing his message. The 21-year-old has applied for around 30 jobs but hasn't landed one yet. Many of the job descriptions say applicants must "collaborate with AI," but "I don't know what that means," she said, noting that most of her classes banned her from using AI. Having to be reminded of all the uncertainty at their graduation, she said, was another "little dent in what was supposed to be a celebratory day." ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Video: Opinion | Graduating Into A.I. Pessimism

Backlash to artificial intelligence is here, and digital natives are leading the charge. The Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the A.I. pessimism in America stems from a lack of responsible regulation. I hate A.I. And I have always assumed that the backlash was coming. "A.I. sucks!" But I guess the thing that I didn't see coming was that it would be led by people even younger than me. "Artificial intelligence." "A.I." "Artificial intelligence." You might have seen graduates booing the mention of A.I. at their commencements this spring. "Interesting." "Whew." You know, not cranky, middle-aged Luddites, but the people who are digital natives who have grown up with this technology. "I ain't gonna trust A.I. no more." "The people who make this stuff are losers." A New York Times poll released in May showed that 47 percent of voters under 30 say that A.I. has been more bad than good, which is the highest percentage in any age bracket. It's been especially bad for new graduates, both because the entry-level jobs that they've been training for are being systematically eviscerated by A.I., and when they try to apply for jobs, they're sending their résumés out into this Kafkaesque A.I. netherworld where they have no idea if a real person is even going to look at it. "If we do see this economywide boost in productivity and economic growth from A.I., how are we going to make sure that working people are cut in on that for once?" I spoke to Bharat Ramamurti. He pointed out that other countries have taken much more robust approaches to regulating A.I. And as a result, people seem to feel much more comfortable about it. So, for example, in the Nordic countries, where they have something called sectoral bargaining, people can kind of bargain on behalf of an entire profession. Whereas in the United States, where people already experience an enormous degree of precarity in their economic lives, A.I. has just been something that's made that a lot worse. "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool." There have been a lot of A.I.-linked layoffs. "The A.I. models learn from having real -- from watching really smart people do things." A.I. has been cited as a reason for big companies to roll back benefits. It's used as basically a lever to say that people can expect less from the workplace because they are replaceable. "The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence." "Boo!" As the American public becomes more and more hostile to A.I. -- -- "It will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate." The A.I. industry is responding by pouring even more money into the political system, both through lobbying and through dark money. They're becoming one of the biggest spenders. And ironically, this just exacerbates, I think, the anger and sense of frustration that people feel, because they feel like here are these giant corporations headed by these out-of-touch oligarchs who are telling you that they are going to remake your society and you have no say in it. There's a connection between this intense animosity toward A.I. and the very well-justified sense that our government has failed us. I think if people had more faith that their government could harness this technology, they wouldn't find the technology itself so dystopian. But people understand that they're going to be left in this country at the mercy of the market. And in some sense, that, I think, is what they're booing. Your career starts at the beginning of the A.I. revolution. The rise. The is the next industrial revolution. Oh, wow. I struck a chord. May I finish? Only a few years ago, A.I. was not a factor in our lives. But. Right. OK, we've got a bipolar topic here, I see. OK. And now A.I. capabilities are in the palm of our hands, and and. I love it. Passion. Let's go. OK. if you let me make this point, please. In the 50 years prior, streaming rewrote the economics; social media rewrote the discovery model. A.I. is rewriting production. As we sit here. I know it. Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool. Hey, like I said, you can. Hey, like I said, you can. You can hear me now, or you can pay me later. It's rational, and it's amplified every day by social media platforms with algorithms that have learned with great precision that fear earns clicks and that anxiety drives engagement. But I want to say something to you this evening as clearly as I can, to speak of the future, as though it has already been decided, is to surrender the one thing that actually matters. You are surrendering your agency. The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, and in startups, in classrooms, in legislators and the people building. It will be you and people like you. The question is not whether I will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like. But what we do know is it will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate. My hope is that you will choose to engage anywhere, that you choose to be in the room where these decisions take place, and to have a voice

Why College Students Are Booing AI

College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI "the next Industrial Revolution." And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned "the architects of artificial intelligence," last year's Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is "rewriting the production process." Boos, audible enough to be captured on video. Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved "wildly unpopular" because it was "striking a sore spot." The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that "The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam." Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know "exactly what they thought of AI." Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious -- that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI. Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing? But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school as well. Three years ago, the first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students raced to see what AI could do -- and what they could get away with by using it -- while professors and universities found themselves ignorant and unprepared. Even students at small, elite liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar, have found themselves wrestling with AI's ability to help them cheat their way out of the bespoke, high-touch, and expensive education that made attending a small college appealing. The public seems to want these boos to mean something definitive and specific -- the way an AI chatbot is supposed to provide a certain answer, right or wrong. To me, the booing sounds more like a cosmic howl. Artificial intelligence exposed the wicked problems in higher education that long predated AI: bureaucratic universities, transactional students, overburdened faculty, risk-averse administrators, and a culture obsessed with achievement. From up close, the crisis was never a single failure but an accumulation of compromises. Students gamed the rules. Professors cut corners. Administrators chased mandates and opportunities. All of them were responding rationally to institutions that rewarded ambition, efficiency, and advancement over learning itself. I thought of this knotty mess when I watched the clip of Borchetta, the record-label CEO, getting heckled at Middle Tennessee State University. "Deal with it," Borchetta said after the boos began. "It's a tool," he said of AI. "Make it work for you." Borchetta had given $15 million to name the university's college of media and entertainment, making him one of the types of people whose wealth and influence now drives academic policy. Watched in isolation, the clip suggests a tidy story. A rich guy who got his sneers at students whose theirs he now threatens to automate away, while also lecturing those very same students that they better accept this future as both inevitable and desirable. Borchetta's label, Big Machine Records, signed a young Taylor Swift in 2005, an accomplishment that later devolved into a spectacle of creative credit, ownership, and control after Big Machine sold her masters to Scooter Braun. How much more symbolism does one require to cast AI as bad news, and people such as Borchetta as evil overlords for wielding it with so little thought? But listening to Borchetta's entire speech -- which I had to scroll past a Google AI overview of the controversy it supposedly summarized to find -- I felt as if I were visiting an alternate universe. Borchetta told, in brief, the story of Napster, whose 1999 appearance caused record executives to "lose their minds." They saw only the threat, and for that reason, Borchetta said, they could not see the future -- which was music streaming. And that future was not great for recording artists. Record executives like him, and the artists he distributed, went from wholesaling albums for $12 or so to "literally chasing fractions of pennies around the world," he said. Borchetta presented streaming as a foreign invader that was unwelcome but too powerful to defeat. Whether Borchetta deserves praise for how he navigated this situation is debatable. In addition to signing Swift and growing acts such as Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, Borchetta's Big Machine also embraced digital marketing -- including on Myspace -- earlier than other labels, making him seem prescient. But the Swift dispute, which arose in 2019, during the $330 million sale of Big Machine, also made Borchetta seem like an executive who put his own interests ahead of the artists he also claimed to champion. A conflict between an artist and a record label is not a new story (Prince versus Warner, George Michael versus Sony, and the Beatles versus Capitol are but a few precedents). But the Swift-Borchetta dispute took place at a moment of ambiguous and massive cultural change, when "creators" began overtaking artists as the owners and operators of their own work and catalog. And part of the change was the emergence of artists who advertised themselves as executives, which is exactly how Swift came out of the fiasco -- as a billionaire who found the balance between label power and individual power. "What will be the stories we tell from this turbulent moment in time?" Borchetta asked his audience. He leaned on commencement-safe aphorisms such as There is no limit to what you can do to encourage the graduates before him. He told them to "be fearless." He urged them not to let the entertainment industry convince them that "there are no seats left at the table." It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that "AI is rewriting production" came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta's unrehearsed response, "Deal with it," seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it. I wasn't in the room, and I can't speak to the intentions of the students who booed. But they may have been expressing dissatisfaction less against AI in particular than against the complex problem of how to be a creative person in the second quarter of the 21st century. "Then do something about it," Borchetta finally said to the AI boos. In context, Borchetta was not a clueless AI booster hawking the tech to college graduates who can't stand it. "Invest in the skill and the art of creation," he said in conclusion. "AI is not going to change that." After watching the actual speech, rather than the clip extracted from it and posted to TikTok or broadcast on cable news, I felt a tug of discomfort. This pang has become familiar as I've thought, written, and lived in this new era of AI: that the harm the technology is accused of bringing about -- a slurry of automated thought and expression built of approximated, statistical sentiment rather than considered, individual judgment -- motivates AI detractors as much as proponents. That "AI thinking" is now all thinking, and that it amounts to not thinking much at all. The whole notion of opposition to or support of AI has started to seem irrelevant. A host of conditions -- among them handheld computers and social media, cable news and supermarket tabloids, technological opportunism and historical ignorance -- produced a situation in which "The Class of 2026 Hates AI" emerged as a convenient headline, one compatible with the social-media music-discovery process that Borchetta accurately explained. Read: The AI backlash could get very ugly And, you know, maybe the class of 2026 does hate AI. Surveys suggest that it is widely unpopular in the United States, and for good reason. AI is not yet responsible for the wholesale collapse of the job market, but companies have certainly used AI as an excuse to cut jobs or not fill new ones. The entry-level-job market is worse than it's been in almost four decades, and those are the opportunities that today's graduates were promised when they were coaxed to strive toward the accomplishments that got them into college in the first place. Whatever pressure AI is exerting on opportunity seems doomed to make students even more focused on aspiration and success. That pressure will only worsen the state of affairs in colleges and universities, which are also beset by the financial chaos of the second Trump administration, a cascade that may threaten the very idea of American college life. The boos don't mean nothing, but they probably don't mean something easily summarized, either. So an easy answer is: Just blame AI anyway. If the same forces of power and control that turned Napster into Spotify, and Google into Gemini, would stop turning the screws yet again, and even more tightly, on the torture machine that has been constricting us for years and decades, then we would be free. I suppose that is true, but it is also a fantasy. And the future is built not from a fantasy but from the present, and the present is given to us in its current form. This is different from saying AI is here, so deal with it. In the ideal version of the college classrooms of 2026, a topic such as this would be given the time, space, and attention to unfold slowly, deliberately, and systematically. "It's complicated!" the ideal version of a professor like me would say, and the student would want to learn more, and would exit the classroom and cross the quad talking about it, and would come to office hours and write a thoughtful paper and be inspired to pursue a calling or invent an idea or just reverberate inside the complexity of the question, and by extension the complexity of most questions, or most good ones, anyway. I wonder if such a future can still exist for college students (or professors, or writers), or if it has already been abandoned. I worry that this time, the answer is a simple one.

Gen Z is not booing AI. It is booing its own job market

Eric Schmidt stood at a lectern at the University of Arizona's spring commencement and told a stadium full of graduates that the impact of artificial intelligence would be 'larger, faster, and more consequential' than anything they had so far lived through. The former Google chief executive was attempting, on the published account, to be reassuring. He was speaking about the great human capacity for adaptation. The boos started anyway. They were still going when Schmidt finished. Twelve days earlier, at the University of Central Florida, the real-estate executive Gloria Caulfield had used the phrase 'the next industrial revolution' in her own commencement speech. The students had booed her, too. The framing the wire reporters reached for, in both cases, was generational confusion. Young people, the framing went, were misreading a technology cycle their elders had already lived through. The framing was wrong. What the graduating cohort of 2026 was responding to, in both Arizona and Florida, was the most accurate read available on the labour market they were graduating into. They were not booing the technology, they were booing the speech that announced their redundancy. Consider what the data says about that cohort. Bill McDermott, the chief executive of ServiceNow, told a March conference audience that new-college-graduate unemployment could reach 30% inside two years as AI absorbed the entry-level white-collar workload. The figure was, at the time, treated as deliberately provocative. Two months later, Goldman Sachs' April research put the actual number of US jobs being lost to AI at roughly 16,000 per month, with the Gen Z cohort carrying a disproportionate share of the displacement. The Dallas Federal Reserve, in its own working paper from earlier in 2026, found that the unemployment-rate gap between entry-level workers and experienced workers had widened sharply post-pandemic, specifically in occupations exposed to AI substitution. Anthropic's Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the company making one of the most widely-deployed enterprise AI products, has repeatedly forecast that AI will eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Each of those data points is on the record. Each is reachable from the same Google search the booing students were running on their phones during commencement. What makes the cohort distinctive is not that it is sceptical of new technology. Every cohort has been sceptical of the new technology that arrived as it tried to enter the labour market. What is distinctive about the class of 2026 is that it is the first one to enter the labour market while the displacement is being publicly costed by named chief executives in dollar terms, on stage, in named industries, with dated commitments. Standard Chartered's chief executive Bill Winters told investors in Hong Kong on Tuesday that the bank would cut more than 15% of its back-office roles by 2030, in HR, risk, and compliance, and that the cuts would 'replace lower-value human capital' with AI. Those are the roles new graduates take in their first three years inside a bank. Meta cut 8,000 jobs on the same week inside a restructuring framed around AI-product reorganisation, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg framing the trade as converting payroll into AI capital expenditure. The aggregate technology-sector cut so far in 2026, on the running count, is just under 110,000 jobs across 137 companies. The class of 2026 has been reading these numbers, more or less in real time, since their second year at university. What gives the booing its accuracy is that the displacement is not, on the available evidence, falling evenly across age cohorts. Earlier generations went through technology cycles in which the workers most exposed to the new technology were also the workers best positioned to acquire the new skills the technology rewarded. The Gen Z exposure pattern is the opposite. The Dallas Fed paper is precise on this point: the unemployment gap is between entry-level workers and experienced workers, not between technologists and non-technologists. The skill that protects you against this particular wave of automation is not knowing how the technology works. It has ten years of contextual judgment on a workflow that a model can now run in two seconds. Older workers have that judgment, but younger workers do not. The displacement, in that frame, is being absorbed by precisely the cohort that has the least labour-market power to resist it. The boardroom response has been to insist that the new equilibrium will produce more interesting work for the cohort that survives the transition. The Multiverse pitch, as one example among many, is that companies will scale the human side of their workforce by training existing employees to operate AI agents rather than by replacing them. That is a serious thesis. It is also one that depends on companies actually doing the training rather than cutting the headcount. The same StanChart announcement that committed to the 15% back-office cut did not announce a corresponding training programme of equivalent scale. Meta's redeployment of 7,000 staff into AI-focused roles, announced the day before its 8,000-person cut, applied to the headcount it was keeping rather than to the headcount it was letting go. The class of 2026 has noticed the asymmetry. The boardroom commentary on the transition has noticed it less consistently. There is a deeper point about how this cohort encounters the transition. Earlier generations learned about labour-market displacement either in retrospect, through their parents' experience, or prospectively, through union-organised political education. Gen Z has learned about it concurrently, through TikTok, LinkedIn, employer-side product launches and CEO-of-the-month commentary, with the dataset arriving faster than any previous generation's. The result, on the evidence of the booing, is a cohort that has done the arithmetic before the speech-writers have finished writing the speeches. The MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has been warning publicly that automating entry-level Gen Z jobs will backfire commercially because it eliminates the talent pipeline that produces the experienced workers companies still need. The argument is correct. It is also, in market-implementation terms, taking longer to land than the layoff announcements that ignore it. The structural fact underneath the cohort's response is that the AI transition is, on the cleanest read, the first one in modern memory where the productivity gain is being captured in capital rather than redistributed through labour. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Apple are committing combined AI infrastructure spending of over $700bn in 2026. Each of those announcements lands in the same news cycle as the layoff announcement from the same balance sheet. The aggregate spending is rising. The aggregate employment is falling. The trade is being run, in plain accounting terms, by converting wage line items into capex line items. The cohort being asked to applaud the transition is the cohort whose entry-level jobs are the wages being converted. What the booing is doing, in that frame, is not what the press-section framing said it was. It is not generational confusion about a technology cycle. It is the recognition, by a cohort that has done its own homework, that the speech being delivered to them is the corporate-PR version of the press release that already named them as the line item being eliminated. The right metaphor for the moment is not the Industrial Revolution. The industrial revolution had a counter-movement, eventually, that organised the workforce into something the technology could not unilaterally absorb. The class of 2026 has not yet found its equivalent. It has started by booing the commencement speakers. That is, in the strictest possible reading, an unusually accurate first move.

Advice for 2026 commencement speakers: Don't bring up AI

Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield (left) was the graduation speaker at University of Central Florida and Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta spoke at Middle Tennessee State University's graduation. Both speakers were booed by students when they brought up artificial intelligence. University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University via Storyful/Screenshots by NPR hide caption toggle caption University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University via Storyful/Screenshots by NPR Glendale Community College's commencement ceremonies hit a snag just as students were walking across the stage to get their diplomas last week. The wrong names were being read aloud at the ceremony, just outside Phoenix. Some of the graduates' names didn't even get read. The college's president, Tiffany Hernandez, tried to explain the problem. "We're using a new AI system as our reader," she said, leading to loud boos from the audience. (In a statement, the college blamed technical issues and said it had apologized to students for the experience.) Other commencement speakers who have brought up the sweeping changes that artificial intelligence is driving are also facing boos from the Class of 2026. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI to the graduating class of the University of Central Florida on May 8 as "the next industrial revolution." Graduating students at Middle Tennessee State University booed when record executive Scott Borschetta told them at their May 9 commencement ceremony, "AI is rewriting production as we sit here." Borschetta responded to the boos with: "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool." As the booing continued, he added, "Then do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed by University of Arizona graduates at their commencement on May 15, including when he said, "The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence." ChatGPT was released in 2022, when many of this year's undergraduates were just starting college. Many have embraced AI for good and for ill, whether to build businesses or use it to cheat. But despite - or perhaps because of - those experiences, many graduates feel those boos are justified. "I think my gut reaction was I would be one of those people in the crowd booing," said Maggie Simmons, who will attend her own graduation ceremony at the University of Denver next month. She told NPR she is concerned AI is hurting the planet and harming Black and minority communities. AI language models have been found to reinforce systemic racism and data centers needed to power AI systems have had a disproportionate impact on minority neighborhoods. "The future should be these people in this room that are earning their degree and now going out into the workforce," said Simmons, who studied molecular biology and Spanish to prepare to become a pediatrician one day. "We should be celebrating them and their brains, not some artificial intelligence that in the future is going to take their jobs and especially without regulation." Kareen Gill, a recent graduate of American University with a political science degree thinks a lot of her generation is feeling pessimistic about AI. "I think at the beginning we were excited about it and it was this cool thing, 'Oh, I can write an essay for you,' but now like, we don't want that anymore and we don't want it messing with our job prospects and messing with the jobs that we've worked for years -- so hard for four years -- to kind of be eligible for," Gill said. One immediate impact Gill said she has noticed is fewer internships and entry level positions doing things like answering phones because AI is replacing some of those jobs. "So we're seeing that firsthand and we're seeing how much it's disadvantaging us," said Gill. "But I don't think that older generations are necessarily in our shoes in that way. It's not really going to impact their future on the rest of their adulthood in the same way." Indeed, a March poll from Quinnipiac University showed that there are generational differences in how concerned Americans are about AI taking jobs "Gen Z, despite being more familiar with AI, is the most pessimistic about jobs, with 81% saying that AI will decrease job opportunities," said Chetan Jaiswal, an associate professor of computer science and associate chair of the Department of Computing at Quinnipiac who also worked on the poll. Jaiswal said that the poll showed that Americans overall are more concerned and less excited about AI as the technology's impacts are becoming more evident. "People are not rejecting AI, but people are asking questions now since the initial AI fever is gone," Jaiswal said. That point was echoed by Gill, the recent AU graduate, who said her generation's concerns about AI go far beyond getting their first jobs. "How they're making billionaires richer and depleting our environment has really opened our eyes to the ripple effects of AI," she said. Indeed, Quinnipiac's poll found only 5% of Americans feel AI development is being led by people or organizations that represent their interests.

US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers: 'They're not reading the room'

Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects When Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State University this spring, predictions about artificial intelligence already had him questioning the value of his degree. Then a music executive started preaching about AI's transformative power during a commencement speech. "This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the last 10 years than in the 50 years prior ... AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine. After a few stray boos from graduates, he doubled down: "Deal with it." The students' jeering grew louder, but Borchetta barreled through: "You can hear me now or you can pay me later ... then do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." He continued: "The things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete." Borchetta's remarks were "a knife to the chest", says Pagel, who studied political science and human development family sciences. He felt the boos reflected how annoyed students were about what they saw as out-of-touch executives downplaying their anxieties about AI. A 2025 Harvard poll of young people in the US found that a majority see AI as a threat to their career prospects. Pagel and his peers are entering a job market where AI's efficiency is already being used to justify mass layoffs. While it's unclear which jobs may be entirely replaced by AI - and whether AI could eventually create more career pathways than it destroys - recent graduates are feeling betrayed. "We've been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: 'Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don't need to do it any more,'" Pagel says. "We can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price." Borchetta's speech is one of several at commencement ceremonies this spring that have revealed a disconnect between the executives championing AI and students, eliciting derision in real time even for Google's former CEO. Recent graduates at the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona booed speakers who compared the advent of AI to the Industrial Revolution and the development of the laptop and smartphone. Sarah Kreps, a Cornell University professor who has studied societies' reactions to new technology, says: "These tech executives are not reading the room ... These kids have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree that they don't know will serve them well." The students at these ceremonies "are a mouthpiece for the population at large", Kreps adds. While they may feel AI's disruptive effects acutely as entry-level job seekers, AI has proved unpopular among the general US public. A national survey conducted for NBC News earlier this year polled 1,000 registered voters and found only 26% view AI positively and 46% view it negatively. AI scored worse than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the same poll, but better than the Democratic party and Iran. Anger against AI is palpable across the country - from communities protesting against datacenters powering the AI boom, to workers disputing their CEOs' claims that AI can, effectively, replace them. Pagel is considering a career in helping children undergoing medical treatment, or entering politics - perhaps running for office, or working as a liaison for federal agencies. "That sphere depends on human face-to-face interaction. No computer can take that," he says, calling AI-generated campaign ads "the cheap route". Pagel is not an absolutist though. He does use Grammarly, he says, "because I can't goddamn spell". "Dyslexia for the win," he adds. Borchetta did not respond to a request for comment. But MTSU said in a statement that the university "understands and remains compassionate about our students' concerns and questions about AI affecting their careers". CEOs' graduation speeches about AI have become a preventable PR disaster, according to Parry Headrick, founder of Crackle PR, a tech public relations agency that has worked with startups. Executives should have acknowledged and reassured students' anxieties, while also advising them to adapt. He says: "That's the nature of the speech, versus: 'Hey kids, buckle up.' "What in the heck is anybody who is young and in school supposed to do when you have these tech executives beating their chests about the next Industrial Revolution when they can't afford to buy groceries or pay for rent?" Headrick asks. Nearly half of college students said their financial stress made it hard to concentrate on their coursework, according to a 2026 report from Trellis Strategies, a research group focused on postsecondary education. At the University of Arizona, 20-year-old Arian Chavez, was angry about his school's decision to let ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt speak, even before he got on stage. Chavez, a junior studying chemical engineering, is part of a group called Students for Socialism, and helped them organize an online petition to remove Schmidt as a commencement speaker. (Activists mainly took issue with sexual assault allegations against Schmidt from a former business partner. Schmidt has vehemently denied those allegations. Patricia Glaser, an attorney representing Schmidt, said in a statement that the claims are "a desperate and destructive effort to publish false and defamatory statements to escape accountability from an existing arbitration over a business dispute".) In Schmidt's graduation speech last week, he compared AI's rise to the computer. There were already some boos as he began speaking, with a few students giving a thumbs down as the camera panned on to them. Chavez, who was booing from the start, said some graduating students had their backs turned on Schmidt and that others were confused by the initial jeers - before Schmidt began talking about AI - but as his speech progressed, many more students joined the booing. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt said, amid a chorus of boos. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create, and I understand that fear." Schmidt's reassurances didn't win Chavez over. "They are putting the wants and needs of billionaires over us," he says, adding that he wished companies would use AI to make workers' lives easier, instead of using it to "extract more profit from us, or replace us". "It's up to us as engineering students to use our knowledge for the service of the planet and not billionaires," he says. Chavez wants to work in the environmental regulation of chemical plants. A representative for Schmidt said the former Google CEO "has tremendous respect for differences of opinion in AI but believes the best way to address these challenges is to talk about them". At Glendale Community College in Arizona, it wasn't a graduation speaker that drew students' ire, but the AI-powered machine reading out their names. Turns out, it missed some. College president Tiffany Hernandez apologized and told graduates towards the end of the ceremony: "Here's what's happening. We're using a new AI system as our reader," she said, as boos roared through the arena. Hernandez paused for a few seconds and let out a few nervous laughs. "That's a lesson learned from us." Aidan Benjamin, who is graduating from Glendale Community College this summer with an associate's degree in accounting, was at the ceremony to support his cousin. He thought she would be walking the stage. She never did, because the AI announcement system never called her name. "I was booing because I was like, this sucks. This is such a big moment for students." Benjamin said they both laughed about the malfunction afterwards. "But it just didn't feel good at the end of the day, like, it shouldn't have happened that way," he says.

AI backlash hits graduation season

The big picture: The class of 2026 is entering a job market that's on ice as employers anticipate how AI will change their workforce needs. * So, many grads weren't jazzed about the technology's front-and-center role in their graduation ceremonies. Driving the news: Glendale Community College relied on AI to read its graduates' names last week, to spectacular failure. * The system malfunctioned, announcing names in the incorrect order and skipping many others altogether. * "Here's what's happening. We're using a new AI system as our reader," college president Tiffany Hernandez said, to a chorus of boos, during the ceremony. Meanwhile, boos began the moment former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, U of A's commencement speaker, took the stage last Friday. * And they picked up steam every time he mentioned AI. What they're saying: "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that, I can hear you," Schmidt said. Zoom out: Other tech-focused graduation speakers received similar responses nationwide, signaling widespread anxiety over AI's impact on the entry-level workforce. Grads have some empirical evidence to back up their fears: * The unemployment rate for recent grads was 5.7% in Q4 2025. That's above the national rate (4.2%), which almost never happens. * Underemployment for recent grads is 42.5%, the highest since 2020. Between the lines: AI is not the root cause of all the job market woes, but it's catching almost all of the blame, per recent polling. * Gen Z's excitement about AI dropped 14 points over the last year to just 22%, according to Gallup polling released last month. * Hopefulness about the technology fell nine points to 18%, while anger rose nine points to 31%. The bottom line: For 70 years, a bachelor's degree was the most reliable on-ramp to a stable career. That's no longer true, Axios' Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in a recent "Behind the Curtain" column.

'Learn to read the room': ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the latest commencement speaker to get booed for mentioning AI

* Eric Schmidt is the latest AI advocate to get booed by students * The University of Arizona class of 2026 weren't impressed by his AI remarks * There's been a growing backlash to the tech from graduates Less than a week after University of Florida students booed real estate executive Gloria Caulfield for mentioning AI at their commencement speech, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been given the same treatment for the same reason at the University of Arizona. "You will help shape artificial intelligence," seems to be the line that the students took the most umbrage at, as per The Verge, though Schmidt also acknowledged the worries and fears that come along with AI -- including significant changes in the jobs market. With Caulfield's address, it was the "artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution" line that got the loudest boos, while The Register reports on a similar reaction to mentions of AI at the Middle Tennessee State University by record producer Scott Borchetta. It seems like the graduating class of 2026 really aren't ready to hear about the benefits of AI at the moment, and are much more concerned about an AI apocalypse arriving -- a worry driven by a rise in deepfakes, hallucinations, energy shortages, and out-of-control agentic bots. An 'insane message' to deliver Former CEO Of Google Receives Massive Backlash For Praising AI At Graduation from r/singularity Most of the online reaction to Schmidt's speech was negative. "Learn to read the room," advised one Redditor, while another described it as an "insane message" to deliver to new graduates who are being told that AI might take up all the jobs they're about to apply for. For others, it's not that AI is inherently bad as a technology, but rather that AI companies and regulators aren't doing enough to help those who will be negatively affected by it. There's a real concern that the rich will get richer and leave everyone else behind. We're at an interesting crunch point where we've got AI companies increasingly hyping up the technology, while many businesses struggle to use it effectively, and those who think they may be displaced by AI continue to rail against it. As for Schmidt's former company, Google, it's hosting its annual I/O show later today, and there should be a lot more AI packed into the announcements: if you want to hear what the future holds (and cheer or boo accordingly), you can follow along online. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

The sound of graduating from college in the AI summer of 2026: boo! | Fortune

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced repeated jeers over the weekend during his keynote address to about 10,000 University of Arizona graduates on the rise of AI. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said, as booing began to build in the audience. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt responded as the boos continued. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating ... and I understand that fear." To students the topic felt tone deaf, said Olivia Malone, a 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate bound for law school. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," said Malone. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Similar responses to keynote speakers who touched on AI at other universities highlight a pervasive sense of anxiety among today's college students. Across campuses and in a multitude of recent surveys, students say they are trying to figure out which skills, majors and jobs won't be rendered useless by AI. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. A recent Gallup poll of Generation Z youth and adults, between ages 14 and 29, found increasingly negative attitudes toward AI. About half of Gen Z teens and adults say they use AI daily or weekly. But anger about the technology has increased since a year ago, while excitement and hopefulness about AI is declining. Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during a keynote this month at the University of Central Florida. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said, as boos erupted, to her surprise. She turned around to ask those behind her, "What happened?" "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" said Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Development Company in Orlando. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said, prompting cheers. "And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand," she said to more jeering. A similar response met music executive Scott Borchetta when he spoke to the graduating class of Middle Tennessee State University about how AI is shaping the music industry. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, as the students in caps and gowns booed. "I know it. Deal with it ... Do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops. The advice didn't land well with students like Malone, who said the former Google executive's speech was more self-serving than inspirational. "It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever," said Malone, noting that the choice of Schmidt as keynote speaker had also been controversial because his name appears in a tranche of files on millionaire financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. "Everybody I was sitting by was really hooting and hollering about that, yelling, 'Epstein files! Epstein files!'" Simply appearing in the Epstein files doesn't implicate wrongdoing. Part of the backlash from graduating students stems from the dismal job market they're entering. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years. Sami Wargo just graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where an AI expert was the undergraduate commencement speaker despite a student petition demanding that the school find someone else. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," said Wargo, who majored in digital media and minored in advertising. Chris Duffey, an AI evangelist at Adobe who recently used AI to "co-author" a book titled "Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence," took the stage anyway. "Innovation," he told the students, "will reveal what can be done, but only you can decide what should be done." Wargo said she joined other students around her in booing his message. The 21-year-old has applied for around 30 jobs but hasn't landed one yet. Many of the job descriptions say applicants must "collaborate with AI," but "I don't know what that means," she said, noting that most of her classes banned her from using AI. Having to be reminded of all the uncertainty at their graduation, she said, was another "little dent in what was supposed to be a celebratory day." ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Recent commencement speeches show students are souring on AI. How deep does the disapproval go?

Mary Cunningham is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. She previously worked at "60 Minutes," CBSNews.com and CBS News 24/7 as part of the CBS News Associate Program. Public attitudes toward AI seem to be evolving as quickly as the technology permeates society. That dynamic was on full display on Sunday, when University of Arizona students jeered former Google CEO Eric Schmidt during his commencement speech as he discussed the future of AI, according to an online video of his remarks posted by the school. Commencement speakers at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University also elicited negative reactions when they mentioned AI in their speeches, according to NBC News. The backlash reflects a broader tension over AI: Companies and executives are promoting it as a productivity breakthrough, while many workers, especially younger Americans trying to start careers, fear it could narrow their path into stable employment. Recent data from Gallup captures the growing pessimism: 43% of people ages 15 to 34 think it's a good time to find a job, down from 75% in 2022, and 21 percentage points lower than those 55 and older. This may "partly reflect anxiety about automation and artificial intelligence displacing entry-level roles," Gallup said. To make matters more complicated, recent graduates are entering the workforce at a historically challenging time in the labor market, marked by muted hiring. Data from the Labor Department shows the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds stood at 7.6% in April, above the overall rate of 4.3%. Some recent grads describe sending hundreds of applications before landing a role. "They're worried about AI and creativity, they're worried about AI and impact on relationships, like adults in general, they're worried about AI in jobs," said Colleen McClain, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center who specializes in internet and technology. It's not just college students, with the broader American population also voicing mixed feelings about the potential benefits of AI. A recent CBS News Poll found that many people report being content to hand over more tedious tasks, such as proofreading, to AI to save time. Many corporate executives also tout AI as a way for businesses to boost productivity and profits. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently told CBS News that the technology could shorten the workweek and deliver major scientific breakthroughs. However, data from the Pew Research Center suggests that as Americans become more familiar with the technology, they are also becoming more skeptical of it. "One trend we've seen is that Americans have become more wary of AI over time," McClain said. "We see that since we started tracking these views in 2021, concern has increased." Part of that wariness is showing up in concerns about the job market: 42% of Americans think AI will eliminate jobs in their field, while 45% think AI companies will hurt the economy, according to separate CBS News polling in 2025. There's a large disconnect between the general public and AI experts when it comes to how AI will impact jobs, McClain said. According to a Pew Research survey released in 2025, 73% of AI experts think AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on work, compared to just 23% of U.S. adults. While economists say AI's impact on the labor market remains relatively muted so far, there are some signs of strain: New research from Goldman Sachs shows that job openings in occupations highly exposed to AI -- where the technology is likely to substitute for human labor -- are now below pre-pandemic levels. Vulnerable professions include legal assistants, proofreaders, telephone operators and insurance claims clerks. While AI isn't killing vast numbers of jobs, the shift suggests the technology is already rewiring parts of the labor market as companies seek ways to cut costs and boost productivity. For instance, the fastest-growing job title for young U.S. workers on LinkedIn is "AI engineer," the networking company recently found. Between 2023 and 2025, LinkedIn added 639,000 AI-related job postings in the U.S., 75,000 of which were AI engineer roles. It remains to be seen whether AI will deliver robust job growth and how the labor market would fare if, as some speculate, an AI bubble were to burst. History provides a cautionary tale. At the peak of the dotcom era boom, the Congressional Budget Office projected the economy would create a million jobs or more each year from 2001 to 2003, Dean Baker, an economist and the founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), said in a post on the think tank's website Monday. However, those jobs never materialized. In fact, the economy ended up losing jobs in 2001 and 2002 and gaining just a small share (100,000) in 2003, according to Baker. He said it's difficult to predict the timing of a possible AI bubble and the damage it will cause. But one thing is clear: "The part of the story that we can be certain about is that, as was the case with the last two bubbles, the economic forecasters will miss it," he said.

The new college graduation ritual: booing AI

Driving the news: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt drew repeated boos Friday while discussing AI at the University of Arizona's commencement. * Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield called AI "the next industrial revolution" at the University of Central Florida's commencement, and was immediately drowned out by boos from arts and humanities graduates. "Okay, I struck a chord," she said. * Music executive Scott Borchetta, who discovered Taylor Swift in 2005, told Middle Tennessee State University graduates that "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," prompting boos. He retorted: "deal with it... Like I said, it's a tool. You can hear me now or pay me later." * After an AI system skipped several students' names at Glendale Community College in Arizona, President Tiffany Hernandez blamed the technology for the errors -- and immediately was booed. The other side: Not every commencement speaker who mentioned AI was jeered. * When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Carnegie Mellon graduates that AI will be a net positive and cause "every industry to change," but that "the answer is not to fear the future," he drew no audible pushback. By the numbers: Roughly 42% of Gen Z say AI will harm job opportunities and wages for people like them, compared with 33% of millennials, 39% of Gen X and 37% of baby boomers, according to the latest Axios Harris Poll released Tuesday. * Those concerns show up in job hunting data too, with 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 saying it's a good time to find a job, compared to 64% of those 55 and older -- a 21-point gap, per Gallup. Zoom in: Concerns of the AI boogeyman are not without merit. * A slew of top companies, including Meta, Pinterest and Block recently cited AI automating some tasks as they announced layoffs. Between the lines: Schmidt seemed almost apologetic to the graduates during his speech, acknowledging uncertainty about AI's long-term impact. * "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create," he said. * Still, he compared being AI-adverse to missing a defining opportunity: "When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on. Graduates, the rocket ship is here." Zoom out: AI is creating more jobs than it's killing, and fewer CEOs now expect AI to reduce hiring than they did last year, per EY-Parthenon research. * Huang warned graduates that "AI is not likely to replace you, but someone using AI better than you might." * Despite fears over job displacement, young people are increasingly using AI to help with homework, brainstorming, news consumption and entertainment -- suggesting they see AI as a useful tool. The bottom line: Young people aren't vehemently anti-AI -- they're just scared of being left in the digital dust. Axios' Avery Lotz contributed to this reporting.

The students booing AI aren't Luddites

It's graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation's elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore -- or worse, antagonize -- their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech. The problem this year, however, is that the news of the day is artificial intelligence, and students just don't want to hear it. In the past week or so, at least three graduation speakers have brought up artificial intelligence in their remarks, only to incur jeers from graduates. This includes Gloria Caulfield, a real estate developer who called AI the next "industrial revolution" while speaking to students at the University of Central Florida. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who delivered his address last week at the University of Arizona, hedged and acknowledged fears about the technology before encouraging students to help shape its future anyway. He, too, was derided by the crowd. Music executive Scott Borchetta offered, perhaps, the most off-putting AI commentary of the bunch, and almost taunted the boisterous, disapproving students he encountered at Middle Tennessee State University. "It's a tool," he sneered at attendees, "You can hear me now or pay me later." (Though not a speech, AI also attracted scorn at Glendale Community College, in Arizona, after a school official bashfully revealed that they'd use the technology to read students' names aloud, only for the system to malfunction during the ceremony.)

3 reasons kids hate AI -- especially the ones who refuse to even try it | Fortune

The vibe: I don't want AI to do my thinking for me. That's the whole point of being a person. There are millions and millions of teenagers like this. Across classrooms, online forums, and in polling data, a surprising segment of the generation that was supposed to lead AI adoption is instead leading the resistance to it. The numbers are jarring. An April Gallup survey, conducted in partnership with the GSV Family Foundation, found excitement about AI among Gen Z has dropped 14 percentage points since 2025, falling to just 22%, while anger toward the technology has risen 9 points, to 31%. Among Gen Z non-users of AI, a 2026 Numerator survey of more than 5,000 consumers found 57% say they are not open to adopting it -- compared to just 32% of baby boomers. Read that again: Older Americans are more open to AI than young ones. A separate GWS study found 16% of Gen Z expressed disinterest in AI on their smartphones, versus only 9% of older respondents. That breaks every pattern in the playbook. Teenagers drove the adoption of video games, personal computers, social media, and smartphones -- dragging skeptical parents along behind them. With AI, the adults arrived first and loudest. It was CEOs, consultants, and politicians who declared the revolution. And many kids looked up, assessed the situation, and said: pass. That's the first reason the kids aren't alright with AI: It was foisted upon them by their parents, big tech CEOs and President Donald Trump. Every technology young people have ever loved came to them as a form of play or transgression. Video games were forbidden fruit. Social media was a space adults didn't understand and couldn't control. The internet was a frontier. Each was bottom-up -- youth-native, slightly chaotic, coded as theirs. AI arrived as a mandate. Schools added AI literacy requirements: Nearly three-quarters of K-12 students surveyed by Gallup in 2026 reported their schools had adopted rules about using AI for schoolwork, up from just 51% a year earlier. Employers announced AI-fluency expectations before many students had graduated. The federal government convened task forces. Even well-meaning teachers framed it as a career necessity. Historically, adults panicked about technology kids loved. With AI, adults loved it first -- and for many young people, that alone was a red flag. As the Gallup report concluded: "Gen Z's relationship with AI is stabilizing but not deepening -- adoption is plateauing, enthusiasm is declining, and skepticism is rising." It's just not cool to do what your parents do. Gen Z came of age inside a cultural moment that prized authenticity above almost everything. Anti-filter aesthetics, "de-influencing," the resurgence of vinyl and film photography, the dumbphone movement -- all of it reflects a generation that grew up inside algorithmic inauthenticity and has been quietly fleeing it for years. A 2025 Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial Survey documented this values orientation directly, finding mental well-being and authentic connection as top priorities for the cohort. AI lands directly in the crosshairs of that value system. It generates art. It writes essays. It mimics human voices and relationships. Where earlier disruptive technologies -- television, video games, social media -- were escapist, AI feels like a replacement: for creativity, for thought, for human contact. Among teens who reject AI, the critique shows up with striking consistency. The Wall Street Journal's reporting on teen AI refusers found recurring themes: AI devalues art, makes people lazy, is bad for the environment, and is fundamentally fake. These aren't the complaints of Luddites who fear the machine. They're the complaints of a generation with a worked-out aesthetic and ethical framework -- and that sees AI as a violation of it. Nearly 48% of Gen Z now feels AI's risks outweigh its benefits in work settings, up sharply from 37% who held that view in 2025, the Gallup poll shows. Perhaps most importantly: Gen Z is the first generation to fully adopt a major technology, watch it cause measurable harm to themselves and their peers, and then consciously walk it back. That was the reckoning over social media. A 2025 Deloitte Gen Z and millennial survey found nearly one-third of Gen Z participants had deleted a social media app in the past year. The dumbphone market is surging among under-30 buyers, with Gen Z framing the downgrade not as nostalgia but as deliberate boundary-setting. The lesson Gen Z drew from the smartphone era -- that moving fast and breaking things includes breaking people -- appears to be shaping a more preemptively cautious posture toward AI. That skepticism shows up in the workplace data, too. Eight out of ten Gen Z students surveyed by Gallup believe using AI tools now may complicate their educational experiences in the future. Fewer than 30% of Gen Z workers say they trust AI-assisted work tasks -- with almost none trusting work completed solely by AI. For a generation burned once already, skepticism isn't a bug. It's a feature. The unprecedented nature of this particular tech-lash flies in the face of every corporate executive and politician hailing an unstoppable rocket ship, even a renaissance, coming toward humanity in the 21st century. What if the revolution is happening and the kids just don't show up to the party? If progress is uncool, unethical and untrustworthy, then maybe it's not progress at all.

The generation that grew up with AI hates it

When Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, started talking about artificial intelligence during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, the graduates erupted in boos. "AI is going to touch everything," said Schmidt, as his stadium-sized audience roared its disapproval. "Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done." Maybe he meant this as a promise of opportunity, but the students seemed to hear it as a threat -- or a curse. Something similar happened at the University of Central Florida a week earlier, when real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI as "the next industrial revolution." Listeners booed, and someone shouted, "AI sucks!" Caulfield appeared to be caught off guard, but she shouldn't have been, because evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere. One recent report found that only 18% of Gen Zers feel hopeful about AI, and almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. Politicians with followings among young people -- including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on the left and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback on the right -- are calling for moratoriums on data centers. AI is increasingly a pop culture villain. "The people who make this stuff are losers," said comedian Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO's "Hacks," a show that has put hatred of the technology at the center of its current season. There have even been some high-profile acts of anti-AI violence, including a Molotov cocktail hurled at the home of OpenAI's chief, Sam Altman. As Americans rebel against AI, the industry's oligarchic leaders are responding by trying to buy even more political influence, pouring money into super political action committees and lobbying. Groups supporting AI and crypto, Politico reported this month, "are already becoming the most dominant players on the political battlefield, spending heavily for candidates on both sides of the aisle and in some cases rivaling the fundraising of long-established party groups." The irony is that the industry's attempts to game the democratic system are a big part of its deep unpopularity. One reason Americans seem to despise AI more than people in other countries is that they know our government is too sclerotic to handle it. Researchers at Stanford University found that out of people in 30 countries, Americans had the least faith in their leaders' ability to regulate AI. Internationally, people tend to feel more positively about AI when the state tries to ensure that it benefits them. In a recent article, Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of President Joe Biden's National Economic Council, described how Japan uses public funding and regulatory policy to encourage companies to use AI to complement work by humans rather than replace it. In the Nordic countries, workers often have a formal role in deciding how AI will be deployed and can use acceptance of it as a bargaining chip. As a result, there have been "plenty of technological advancements, including on AI," he told me. (Just last month, Norway introduced self-driving buses on public roads.) By contrast, in the United States, where neither the government nor corporations feel the need to do much for those made redundant by AI, the spread of the technology amplifies an already chronic feeling of precarity. Companies are citing AI as the reason for mass layoffs; according to the Alliance for Secure AI, there have been almost 120,000 AI-linked job losses in the United States just since last year. Recent college graduates are facing a brutal job market as entry-level positions disappear and AI renders the application process inhumanly opaque. During the dot-com boom, tech companies often seemed as if they were leading an arms race to offer new benefits to workers. Now, as Axios reported, firms are rescinding benefits to fund AI expansion. We simply lack the political infrastructure in America to distribute AI's benefits to the public. With the systematic evisceration of the labor movement that started during Ronald Reagan's presidency, said Ramamurti, "the institutions that many other countries have for mediating these kinds of technological advances don't exist in the United States." Of course, it's not only in the workplace that many people feel exploited by AI. Grocery stores are using shoppers' personal data to set pricing. Health insurance companies are employing it to decide what treatments get covered. As MarketWatch reported, a Medicare pilot program using AI for prior authorizations resulted in "some patients waiting weeks longer to get medical procedures -- if they receive care at all." For many people, AI feels extractive, not additive. It's telling that the generation most exposed to AI appears to like it the least. A New York Times poll released Monday shows that 47% of voters under 30 rate AI as "mostly bad," the highest percentage in any age bracket. AI executives, buffered by their colossal fortunes and resulting political connections, don't seem to feel much pressure to win people over. Instead, the industry's message is coercive and bullying: Adopt our product on our terms or be forever left behind. Tech billionaires might be less likely to announce that their inventions will cause mass unemployment if they felt constrained by public sentiment. The fact that they don't shows how broken America's democratic feedback loop has become. Schmidt, of all people, should understand why many are repelled by this increasingly intrusive technology. Last year, he was a writer of a New York Times Opinion essay about how Americans "see AI as a nuisance in their daily lives," even as it's become more of a useful consumer tool in China. "It's paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of AI," he wrote. That can be accomplished only by political action, not hectoring. "Find a way to say yes," Schmidt told the graduates in Arizona. Their boos were their answer: No.

Something Strange Is Happening at College Graduations Across the Country

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nitish Pahwa? Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It's graduation season, so you know what that means: a lotta commencement speeches from wealthy figures of renown -- all directed to debt-burdened, half-asleep, cap-and-gown-clad graduates worried about the frozen job market awaiting them. They grads are also primed to boo any speakers who so much as mutter the words "artificial intelligence." The first viral demonstration of this occurred earlier this month at the University of Central Florida, where Gloria Caulfield -- a vice president for the real estate firm Tavistock Development Company -- addressed a ceremony for arts and humanities and communications grads. Just a few minutes into her speech, Caulfield began warning of "profound change" to come. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution," she said. The boos began, swelling in volume so rapidly that Caufield wondered aloud, "What happened?," before earning some subsequent applause for making the observation that "only a few years ago, A.I. was not a factor in our lives." But the jeers returned once she noted that "A.I. capabilities are in the palm of our hands." Caulfield may have been the first to see her A.I. remarks hit the social media circuit, but she wouldn't be alone. On May 10, Big Machine Records CEO and Taylor Swift discoverer Scott Borchetta closed out graduation week at Middle Tennessee State University with a speech in which he compared A.I. to "a fine instrument, unopened, still sitting in its case" and pointed out that the software is "rewriting [music] production as we sit here." (Fact check: true.) That elicited plenty of interjections from the degree-holders below his lectern, to whom Borchetta responded, "Deal with it." Last Friday, the screams also came for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the University of Arizona and mentioned Time magazine's "Architects of AI" tribute issue, which brought out a lengthy, vocal crowd dissent that continued throughout much of Schmidt's A.I. tangent. The very same day, at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, an "A.I. announcer" messed up the pronunciation and order of several graduates' names as they walked the stage, forcing administrators to pause the event and redo the whole thing with a flesh-and-blood name reader. I don't think the timing and virality of these moments, in this season, is coincidental. The fact is, these undergrads and grad-schoolers have had years to assess the impact of A.I. on their lives and prospects; many of the students in the Class of 2026 got to campus just as ChatGPT took A.I. mainstream in the fall of 2022. By now, they've been bludgeoned nonstop with A.I. promotions across social media, TV, and their own academic departments. They've seen enough of the tech's deleterious impacts -- on the job market, their hometowns, the climate, the basic concepts of critical thinking and social trust and shared reality -- that the supposed benefits promised by the boosters no longer seem in reach. They're mighty upset about all of that, and they're letting out that anger at a moment of maximum catharsis: when they're just about to leave academia, but have to deal with one more stuffy A.I. adult along that path. The golden promise of A.I.'s boosters has been pushed hard in public: an automated utopia free of grunt work and stress, thanks to this ingenious software that will cure cancers and empower individuals to reshape the world as they'd like it. That, to put it lightly, is not what many of these students have seen, and they reasonably do not appear to think that will come to pass. For a whole generation of campus protesters, A.I. symbolizes drones in Gaza; for soon-to-be job-seekers, it means a bunch of bias-laden algorithms and virtual likenesses interviewing them for whatever entry-level gigs actually still exist, or a bunch of awful gig work in content moderation; for women and transgender students especially, it's often meant creeps with smart glasses who may put their clandestine snapshots through automatic deepfake-porn processors; and for STEM pupils of conscience, working in A.I. (if they can even land a steady job in the field) portends resigning oneself to an inevitable gig with some red-pilled and plainly unethical bros, whether Elon Musk or Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Palmer Luckey, before they get laid off anyway. Obviously, none of that means this is a universal sentiment within university bodies. Outside of a few exceptions, substantial shares of college students in all disciplines have copped to ChatGPT-ing their way through school. And in the recent past, there have been plenty of other A.I.-inflected ceremonies that proceeded without disruption, even as a few others elicited some outrage. But recent studies from eminent pollsters (Gallup, Quinnipiac, the Sine Institute) show the same result over and over again: Our young scholars increasingly view A.I. as a future impediment to their future welfare, more a necessary evil that exists and has to be dealt with than another tool that supercharges their productivity. Ironically, someone who does seem to understand all this is notorious A.I. booster Eric Schmidt himself, who assured the disgruntled graduate audience of his sympathy after he rattled off a bit on how artificial intelligence will soon be everywhere, from hospitals to personal relationships. "I know what many of you are feeling about that -- I can hear you," he added as the boos escalated. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create." Yeah, that just about sums it up. Naturally, Schmidt pivoted by telling the kids they just need to take control and redirect all these world-defining shifts on their own. Easy-peasy! (This type of perfunctory philosophizing is par for the course with Schmidt, who in 2024 declared that humans would never patch up the "breaking" climate and that he'd "rather bet on A.I. solving the problem than constraining it.") There is, at least, one other high-level executive who does seem to get it, and to whom college grads have responded very positively. Just this week, Delta CEO Ed Bastian admitted to Emory University's grads in Atlanta that he did use generative A.I. to draft his speech -- only to scrap the apps when "the lack of soul or warmth" from their output became clear. That redemption arc was met with rapturous applause. It turns out that young Americans still appreciate it when a figure of authority advocates for the human touch.

Here's why people are booing college commencement speakers this year

UCF graduates boo a commencement speaker after comments calling artificial intelligence the next industrial revolution at a May 8 ceremony. A time usually marked by loud cheering, congratulatory handshakes and perhaps a few tears of joy was interrupted this commencement season, as graduation speakers' speeches at multiple colleges around the United States were booed and jeered. What set the crowds off was the praise, or even the mere mention, of a common hot topic: artificial intelligence. "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?," said real estate development executive Gloria Caulfield as the audience erupted in loud booing at a ceremony at the University of Central Florida on May 8, reported the USA TODAY Network in Florida. The crowd's reaction came after Caulfield called AI's rise the "next Industrial Revolution." "AI sucks!" someone in the audience can be heard yelling in a video of the incident. A few moments later, the audience erupted again, this time in cheers, after Caulfield said AI was not part of our lives just a few years ago. It's a scene that played out at ceremonies in at colleges in Arizona, Florida and Tennessee this month as commencement season is underway, bringing with it speeches from notable speakers across high-profile sectors invited to impart their wisdom on graduates. Today's college students have a mix of feelings about AI, said Fabrizio Cariani, a professor and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland who teaches a class called "AI and the Human Experience." "There's certainly a cluster of students who are secretly or openly embracing AI," Cariani told USA TODAY. "And then there are some students - and I think this is probably what was going on in these graduation examples - who are worried about the impact of AI on labor markets and on entry-level jobs." AI becomes controversial at graduations At Middle Tennessee State University on May 9, Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta was also booed while talking about AI at the commencement ceremony for the school's college of media and entertainment, which is named after Borchetta, reported the Nashville Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. In his speech, Borchetta highlighted that the speed of technological development in the last decade exceeded the pace of the previous half-century. "Streaming rewrote the economics, social media rewrote the discovery model, AI is rewriting production as we sit here," he said. When the crowd started booing, he pushed back: "I know it. Deal with it," he added. "Like I said, it's a tool." At Glendale Community College in Arizona, AI was booed for another reason; an AI announcing software botched the names of graduates or skipped them entirely, reported the Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network. Hundreds of students were impacted. The school's president, Tiffany Hernandez, addressed the problem on stage during the May 15 ceremony, and many in the crowd booed. "Here's what's happening. We're using a new AI system as our reader," Hernandez said. "That is a lesson learned for us." Many of the students ended up walking the stage a second time, with a real person reading names instead. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak received applause and laughter when he made an AI quip at Grand Valley State University's commencement. "You all have AI," he said. "Actual intelligence." Why graduates are reacting so strongly to AI Cariani cautioned that the strong reactions of crowds at graduation ceremonies don't mean all college students or graduates are rejecting AI. On his campus in Maryland, there is something of a stigma around using AI in academic work, so some proponents are more quiet about their attitudes, he said. But still, a good portion of students have very real concerns about AI and its impact on their lives in college and beyond. College students tend to have a few key concerns about AI, he said: uncertainty over AI's impact on the job market, worries over the ecological impact of big generative AI data centers, questions about academic integrity and even the abstract concept of what authenticity means in a world with AI. In Cariani's class about AI, he wanted to implement certain assignments for which its use was prohibited, but others that he asked students to collaborate with AI to brainstorm about. Some students embraced the idea, but the reaction of a majority was "this attitude of rejection that we are also seeing in these graduation booings." A recent Quinnipiac poll of Americans' thoughts about how AI will impact jobs found that Gen Z - to which most of today's college graduates belong - is the most pessimistic generation on this topic. A whopping 81% thought the advancement of AI will cause a decrease in job opportunities. At Marquette University in Wisconsin, AI expert Chris Duffey spoke at the undergraduate ceremony despite backlash from students, reported the Associated Press. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," recent graduate Sami Wargo told the AP, adding that she joined other students in booing Duffey. Grace Reimer, who graduated with an associate's degree in fine arts from Glendale Community College in Arizona, said she felt the school ruined "one of the biggest moments in my life" with the AI name announcement blunder. "This ceremony was supposed to be something big for me," Reimer told the Arizona Republic. In photos of Reimer on stage during the graduation, the incorrect name and degree are displayed, she said. Students also pointed out to the Republic that their class syllabi had strict rules about the use of AI in academic work; Reiner said students can be punished or expelled for it. Though Cariani said he has an interest in AI, he doesn't think it's a bad thing for graduates to be booing its mention. He was glad to see the evidence that students are thinking critically about the topic, and hopes they will go beyond booing and, for example, take active roles in shaping policy around it. "I think it's a good development to put these questions at the front of the conversation," he said. "Booing is an immediate reaction. I'm assuming that behind this immediate reaction, there is some collection of thoughts, and I want to see those thoughts enter the conversation." In some ways, the advancement of AI is inevitable, he said: "The best thing we can do is have conversations about how to direct these tools towards the betterment of humanity and society." Contributing: Stephanie Murray, the Arizona Republic; Diana Leyva, the Nashville Tennessean; and Samantha Neely, USA TODAY Network-Florida

Graduates Are Booing Pep Talks on AI at College Commencements

As artificial intelligence casts a shadow over career prospects, it is becoming an unwelcome subject at this season's college commencements. At several campuses, graduates have interrupted speakers with stadium-wide boos when the topic turned to AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced repeated jeers over the weekend during his keynote address to about 10,000 University of Arizona graduates on the rise of AI. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said, as booing began to build in the audience. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt responded as the boos continued. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating ... and I understand that fear." To students the topic felt tone deaf, said Olivia Malone, a 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate bound for law school. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," said Malone. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Similar responses to keynote speakers who touched on AI at other universities highlight a pervasive sense of anxiety among today's college students. Polls show growing concern that AI will doom career plans Across campuses and in a multitude of recent surveys, students say they are trying to figure out which skills, majors and jobs won't be rendered useless by AI. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. A recent Gallup poll of Generation Z youth and adults, between ages 14 and 29, found increasingly negative attitudes toward AI. About half of Gen Z teens and adults say they use AI daily or weekly. But anger about the technology has increased since a year ago, while excitement and hopefulness about AI is declining. Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during her keynote this month at the University of Central Florida. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said, as boos erupted, to her surprise. She turned around to ask those behind her, "What happened?" "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" said Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Development Company in Orlando. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said, prompting cheers. "And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand," she said to more jeering. Speakers have tried to stress positives A similar response met music executive Scott Borchetta when he spoke to the graduating class of Middle Tennessee State University about how AI is shaping the music industry. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, as the students in caps and gowns booed. "I know it. Deal with it ... Do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops. The advice didn't land well with students like Malone, who said the former Google executive's speech was more self-serving than inspirational. "It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever," said Malone, noting that the choice of Schmidt as keynote speaker had also been controversial because his name appears in the Epstein files. "Everybody I was sitting by was really hooting and hollering about that, yelling, 'Epstein files! Epstein files!'" Grads already face a tough job market Part of the backlash from graduating students stems from the dismal job market they're entering. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years. Sami Wargo just graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where an AI expert was the undergraduate commencement speaker despite a student petition demanding that the school find someone else. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," said Wargo, who majored in digital media and minored in advertising. Chris Duffey, an AI evangelist at Adobe who recently used AI to "co-author" a book titled "Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence," took the stage anyway. "Innovation," he told the students, "will reveal what can be done, but only you can decide what should be done." Wargo said she joined other students around her in booing his message. The 21-year-old has applied for around 30 jobs but hasn't landed one yet. Many of the job descriptions say applicants must "collaborate with AI," but "I don't know what that means," she said, noting that most of her classes banned her from using AI. Having to be reminded of all the uncertainty at their graduation, she said, was another "little dent in what was supposed to be a celebratory day." ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Students keep booing AI at graduation speeches this year

It's graduation season and that means commencement speakers are offering up their best advice for how to live a happy, healthy, and successful life. But instead of being met with welcoming smiles and engaged head nods, one topic is being met with anger and boos -- AI. In a series of recent incidents, listeners have balked as commencement speakers have either told them to embrace artificial intelligence, or have otherwise mentioned the ever-expanding technology in a speech. It happened when Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances for the Orlando-based company Tavistock, began telling the graduating class at the University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and its Nicholson School of Communication and Media that the "rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution."

College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn't stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams | Fortune

For today's college students, attitudes toward AI can seem paradoxical. On one hand, they've made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. "The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will," Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence." Just days earlier, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told graduating students at the University of Central Florida, "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution." One audience member jeered in response, "AI sucks." But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn't tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class's relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. Some are even using this tool illicitly in the classroom. Jacob Shelley, an associate professor of health law at Western University, said he was overwhelmingly convinced his students cheated on the final exam for one of his classes, with many using AI tools to do so. "The results were anomalous," he told Fortune, noting 8% of his class getting a perfect score on the multiple choice section of the exam while many either struggled on the essay portion or gave written responses with content Shelley hadn't taught in class. "That just never happened in 20 years of teaching." Princeton University faculty voted last week to rescind its 133-year-old honor code and proctor all in-person exams to mitigate cheating using AI. Stanford University senior Theo Baker wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week that "cheating has become omnipresent" at his college. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates -- the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips. Maitraye Das, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, studies Gen Z's attitudes toward AI use, and a report she published last year found most college students use AI, but many don't disclose it. She identified the phenomenon as a form of cognitive dissonance, a psychological pattern in which a set of behaviors may contradict a belief system, leaving individuals to alter either their attitude or actions toward a certain topic. In the case of her research, Das found students feared using AI would impede their critical thinking skills and learning goals. But at the same time, they felt they couldn't afford not to use AI tools, feeling they would be left behind by peers continuing to use the technology. "The job market already seems precarious to them, and so even the students that did acknowledge that, 'Oh, if I just use AI to do my homework, that will stunt my critical thinking,' they still kept using it because the cost of not using it felt higher to them," Das said. Indeed, a stagnant job market, along with tech leaders warning of mass AI job displacement, has instilled fear in many recent grads. In March, Anthropic released a report revealing that AI could theoretically take over most tasks in business and finance, management, computer science, math, legal, and office administration roles, including 94% of tasks for computer and math workers. Concerns around AI taking certain jobs have already begun to materialize as anecdotal evidence, despite no widespread proof of AI markedly changing the labor market. Tech layoffs have topped 110,000 in the first five months of this year alone, with companies like Snap announcing it would eliminate 16% of roles, about 1,000 employees, as it leans into AI. While students see AI as a threat, Das said, the proliferation of AI in the workplace, as well as in schools -- where last year about 30% of teachers said they use AI at least weekly -- has also created a justification for them to use the technology, even if it means cheating or keeping quiet about their own AI use. "They are thinking, 'People rather than me are using AI. Why am I held to a different standard? Why can't I use AI?'" Das said. "So instead of disclosing their AI use or limiting their AI use, they reframe the social context to make their behavior around secretly using AI to feel more acceptable to themselves." Widespread messaging about AI in commencement speeches -- typically coming from AI stakeholders -- have only grown the chip on Gen Z's shoulder around AI use, according to Das. Skyrocketing tech stock valuations and the growth of the Magnificent 7 have created a K-shape of who stands to benefit from the technology's growth. "Students feel that there's a corporate mouthpiece narrative," Das said. "They are facing this very real fear of not landing a job, and so especially the tech CEOs, when they come to these commencement stages and encourage and cheerlead AI, I think students feel a disconnect there." Shelley, the health law professor, agreed that students cheating with AI is less of an endorsement of the technology and rather a survival tactic -- perhaps even one they resent. "AI is going to replace them, at least a lot of them, and they know that, and we're pretending that it won't," he said. "I think they see through it. So students are responsible, but I don't really blame them here." Some of the blame, Shelley argued, lies with educational institutions themselves, which have advocated for students to use AI. Two years ago, Arizona State University launched a collaboration with OpenAI to develop AI tools for higher education. But overall financial aid for colleges is lower now than it was 15 years ago, forcing some students to take part-time jobs. Now strapped for time, they feel like AI is the only way to accomplish their assignments, Shelley said. Das noted that AI authorities, including higher education institutions, have done a poor job identifying what jobs will be created as a result of AI and subsequently encouraging the appropriate form of upskilling. The overall effect is students feeling disenfranchised from their future, resorting to shortcuts that may ultimately not prepare them with the tools or values to thrive as they take their next steps into the world, the experts warned. "The worst thing we could do is blame students here," Shelley said. "It's our job to teach them, to nurture them, to inspire them, to guide them. It's our job to educate them, and it's our responsibility as society to take a deep look and go, 'Why has this happened?'"

Young People Can't Stop Using AI -- But that Doesn't Mean They Like It

College used to be different. We had computers, sure, but when it was 5 a.m. and you were staring down a 9 a.m. deadline for a 10-page paper, there was no algorithm there to save you. You got used to the taste of 5 Hour Energy, or you accepted failure. Muscles honed by long hours in AOL chatrooms helped us crank out hundreds of words in the blink of an eye. Were they coherent? Probably not. But they were at least derived from real thoughts, however bleary they may have been. Students today exist in a world in which machine-learning tools like ChatGPT have completely upset higher education. They're using AI to write papers that professors are using AI to grade. Robot-assisted cheating has killed Princeton University's centuries-old honor code. Teens now entering college are already hardened by years of outsourcing their education to a machine. The media frenzy surrounding AI in higher education has largely painted the Gen Z and Gen Alpha students adapting this new world as lazy or entitled, content to skate by on artificial brainpower. That may be part of it, sure. But it also sells college students a bit short: many of them are still smart enough to realize that AI is going to hurt them more than it helps. The people who don't realize this, unfortunately, are university administrators planning graduation ceremonies. This graduation season, multiple universities have trotted out utterly tone-deaf big-tech boosters in order to inspire a generation of students about to enter one of the most dismal job markets in recent history. At the University of Central Florida, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, a VP for a "smart city" development company, was almost booed off the stage when she called AI "the next industrial revolution," speaking glowingly about the technology to a room full of students whose lives will increasingly be defined by it. It happened again, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also tried to comment on the technology's infiltration of every aspect of public life during Arizona State University's commencement. "You will help shape artificial intelligence," he began, before a chorus of boos broke out. "We do not know the precise contours..." he tried to continue, before being drowned out again. This process repeated several times throughout his speech. "When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on," Schmidt said. "The rocketship is here." The assembled ASU students did not want to get on, it seemed, regardless of the seat. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," Olivia Malone, a recent University of Arizona graduate, told the Associated Press. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta -- famous for selling Taylor Swift's catalogue to Scooter Braun -- even got caught by the AI boos during a speech at Middle Tennessee State. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," Borchetta started. There were some scattered boos from the back of the room. "I know it. Deal with it," he quipped. "Hey, then do something about it, ok?" he said as boos continued. The most surreal example came at Glendale Community College, also in Arizona, where university administrators bizarrely left off dozens of students' names from the rolls during graduation due to a mistake they blamed on a "new AI system." Again, a chorus of boos. What we're seeing here is less an unpopular technology and more a generational divide in how people see the world. Polling on the issue, thus far, is clear: Last year, Pew Research found that while 50 percent of all Americans are concerned about the technology, young people in particular are convinced that it will make people worse at thinking creatively and forming meaningful relationships. The dangers of AI, to people raised around it, aren't hypothetical: they've seen it degrade their lives already. "Our career path is compromised by AI," Don Strouble, a UCF grad who was at the ceremony, later told KnightNews, UCF's student newspaper. Strouble added that he thought people like Caulfield were trying to "force a state of acceptance about something hostile to not only our livelihood but the environment and the livelihood of people living near data centers." For an adult on stage, AI is a glittery new technology, one that makes them excited about the future. After all, their careers are firmly entrenched. Why would Eric Schmidt care if AI tanks the job market he's sending students out into, so long as the value of his shares in Google are going up? His peers who are actively boosting the industry are an extreme example of this. The AI industry is similar to a classic pyramid scheme, where the bottom is falling out more and more every day. Everyone, for the most part, leaves college on the bottom of the pyramid. Only now, there's no solid ground to stand on to even start to climb up -- just a bunch of binary code, zeros and ones. America's youth are smart enough to figure out that in this future, they're the zeroes.

Gen Z and AI: As AI takes centre stage, youth stand in disapproval

Young people express growing anger and anxiety about artificial intelligence. AI is reshaping industries and impacting jobs globally. Tech giants are cutting staff, citing AI advancements. Surveys show a rise in negative emotions towards AI among the youth. Many believe AI's risks outweigh its benefits. This sentiment is evident in recent public events. The AI revolution is here and the boos are getting louder. As artificial intelligence reshapes industries and markets around the world, a sense of dread is deepening among young "digital natives" now entering the workforce, fearful of the impact on jobs and daily life as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini become household names. In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the impact of AI would be "larger, faster, and more consequential" than anything before. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and ⁠every relationship ⁠you have," he said as boos rang out even as he addressed anxieties about job security and an uncertain future. How real those fears are was on show in an announcement by Standard Chartered on Tuesday that it will cut over 7,000 jobs and replace "lower-value human capital" with AI. Many tech firms are also cutting staff, citing AI. Meta, which is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to train its AI model, is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce globally starting this month. Amazon.com has axed some 30,000 corporate jobs in recent months as it pushes AI and efficiency, while in February fintech firm ⁠Block cut nearly half its staff. The Iran war is also softening hiring. Schmidt acknowledged the young generation's fears and called them "rational," but just like the current top executives he painted the change and disruption AI was bringing as something ⁠inevitable that everyone needed to adapt to. Gen Z: Angrier and more anxious about AI However, even as CEOs embrace AI, there have been signs of pushback: from Chinese courts, to unions at South Korean carmakers, Hollywood scriptwriters and India's film industry. And perhaps the clearest sign of discomfort with the vision of the world offered by tech companies is the rising discontent among America's youth. An April report from Gallup showed that a rising number of Generation Z - those born between 1997 and 2012 - were anxious or angry about AI, while those who said they were hopeful or excited by it had fallen sharply compared with a year earlier. Nearly half of respondents said the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, while 15% said it was a net positive, a much bleaker view than a year ago. Most recognized the need to be AI-savvy but said it hindered deeper learning and creativity. "Negative emotions have intensified over the ⁠past year," the report's authors wrote and noted that usage was starting to plateau. "Young adults in the workforce are significantly more likely to view AI as a risk than a benefit." The data did show that positive views of AI increased with the level of usage and decreased amongst those who used it less. Schmidt's frosty reception followed other recent shows of anger at AI. At the University of Central Florida on May 8, a real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was similarly heckled and booed over a commencement speech on AI. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," she said as boos rang out, catching her off guard. "What happened? OK, I struck a chord... Only a few years ago AI was not a factor in our lives." The room burst out in cheers.

Speakers At College Commencement Ceremonies Are Being Met With Boos For Bringing Up AI

"What happened?" one commencement speaker asked during her speech after students booed her for saying artificial intelligence was the next industrial revolution. Students at Glendale Community College booed the school's president when she revealed the college had used artificial intelligence to read aloud students' names during a graduation ceremony, causing several students to be missed. "Graduates, everyone who is standing, here's what's happening," Tiffany Hernandez, president of Glendale Community College, told the crowd during Friday's graduation ceremony. "We're using a new AI system as our reader." The crowd then began to boo. "So that is a lesson learned for us," Hernandez said. "What we were able to do though is each of you were able to walk the stage and get a picture, which is what I would hope would be the most meaningful." The students continued to boo. Hernandez then said students would not be able to walk the stage a second time. A spokesperson with Maricopa County Community College District told HuffPost in a statement they are sorry for the "technical issue." "While the issue was corrected during the ceremony, we are sorry for the disruption it caused during what should have been a celebratory moment for our graduates and their families," the statement read. "We have also communicated directly with graduates to apologize for the experience." "We are incredibly proud of all our graduates and are taking steps to ensure an issue like this does not occur again." With graduation ceremonies underway across the country, students are making their opinions about AI known -- usually in the form of booing whichever speaker is telling them that it's the future and to embrace it. Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, was also booed during her commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for the University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities on May 8. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," she said. The crowd immediately started booing. She turned to the other speakers onstage, looking confused and asked them, "What happened?" She then turned to the crowd and said, "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" She continued: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said to roaring applause. "All right, we've got a bipolar topic here I see." Ethan Lubin, a graduate of the University of Central Florida, was in the crowd during Caulfield's speech and was one of the students who booed. "Talking about artificial intelligence at a college for arts and humanities can be, you know, a bit rough," Lubin told The New York Times, "because it kind of goes against the humanities part." Tavistock Development Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. AI has grown exponentially in modern society in the last few years, and universities have been quick to adopt it in their classrooms. Four in 10 college students said they are are encouraged to use AI, according to a 2026 study from the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education. The majority of students surveyed use AI in their coursework, but for those who don't, they cited ethical reasons for their reasoning. Eric Schmidt, billionaire and former CEO of Google, was also booed during Friday's graduation ceremony for the University of Arizona after he brought up that "The architects of AI" were named Time's 2025 Person of the Year. "So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation. One that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said while the crowd continued booing. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear in your generation."

The AI bots are coming, and the young are booing instead of applauding

The artificial intelligence revolution is here, and the boos are getting louder. As AI reshapes industries and ⁠markets around the world, a sense of dread is deepening among young "digital natives" now entering the workforce, fearful of the impact on jobs and daily life as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini become household names. In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the impact of AI would be "larger, faster, and more consequential" than anything before.

Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements - The Korea Times

Google CEO Eric Schmidt addresses graduates during commencement ceremonies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, May 18, 2009. AP-Yonhap As artificial intelligence casts a shadow over career prospects, it is becoming an unwelcome subject at this season's college commencements. At several campuses, graduates have interrupted speakers with stadium-wide boos when the topic turned to AI Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced repeated jeers over the weekend during his keynote address to about 10,000 University of Arizona graduates on the rise of AI. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said, as booing began to build in the audience. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt responded as the boos continued. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating ... and I understand that fear." To students the topic felt tone deaf, said Olivia Malone, a 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate bound for law school. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," said Malone. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Similar responses to keynote speakers who touched on AI at other universities highlight a pervasive sense of anxiety among today's college students. Polls show growing concern that AI will doom career plans Across campuses and in a multitude of recent surveys, students say they are trying to figure out which skills, majors and jobs won't be rendered useless by AI. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. A recent Gallup poll of Generation Z youth and adults, between ages 14 and 29, found increasingly negative attitudes toward AI. About half of Gen Z teens and adults say they use AI daily or weekly. But anger about the technology has increased since a year ago, while excitement and hopefulness about AI is declining. Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during a keynote this month at the University of Central Florida. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said, as boos erupted, to her surprise. She turned around to ask those behind her, "What happened?" "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" said Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Development Company in Orlando. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said, prompting cheers. "And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand," she said to more jeering. Speakers have tried to stress positives A similar response met music executive Scott Borchetta when he spoke to the graduating class of Middle Tennessee State University about how AI is shaping the music industry. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, as the students in caps and gowns booed. "I know it. Deal with it ... Do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops. The advice didn't land well with students like Malone, who said the former Google executive's speech was more self-serving than inspirational. "It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever," said Malone, noting that the choice of Schmidt as keynote speaker had also been controversial because his name appears in the Epstein files "Everybody I was sitting by was really hooting and hollering about that, yelling, 'Epstein files! Epstein files!'" Simply appearing in the Epstein files doesn't implicate wrongdoing, and a spokesperson for Schmidt, Matthew Hiltzik, downplayed any ties between them, saying Schmidt declined a meeting with the disgraced financier and had "nothing to do with him." Grads already face a tough job market Part of the backlash from graduating students stems from the dismal job market they're entering. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years. Sami Wargo just graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where an AI expert was the undergraduate commencement speaker despite a student petition demanding that the school find someone else. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," said Wargo, who majored in digital media and minored in advertising. Chris Duffey, an AI evangelist at Adobe who recently used AI to "co-author" a book titled "Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence," took the stage anyway. "Innovation," he told the students, "will reveal what can be done, but only you can decide what should be done." Wargo said she joined other students around her in booing his message. The 21-year-old has applied for around 30 jobs but hasn't landed one yet. Many of the job descriptions say applicants must "collaborate with AI," but "I don't know what that means," she said, noting that most of her classes banned her from using AI. Having to be reminded of all the uncertainty at their graduation, she said, was another "little dent in what was supposed to be a celebratory day."

Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

As artificial intelligence casts a shadow over career prospects, it is becoming an unwelcome subject at this season's college commencements. At several campuses, graduates have interrupted speakers with stadium-wide boos when the topic turned to AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced repeated jeers over the weekend during his keynote address to about 10,000 University of Arizona graduates on the rise of AI. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have," Schmidt said, as booing began to build in the audience. "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt responded as the boos continued. "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating ... and I understand that fear." To students the topic felt tone deaf, said Olivia Malone, a 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate bound for law school. "His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students," said Malone. "We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?" Similar responses to keynote speakers who touched on AI at other universities highlight a pervasive sense of anxiety among today's college students. Polls show growing concern that AI will doom career plans Across campuses and in a multitude of recent surveys, students say they are trying to figure out which skills, majors and jobs won't be rendered useless by AI. About 70 per cent of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects, according to a 2025 poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. A recent Gallup poll of Generation Z youth and adults, between ages 14 and 29, found increasingly negative attitudes toward AI. About half of Gen Z teens and adults say they use AI daily or weekly. But anger about the technology has increased since a year ago, while excitement and hopefulness about AI is declining. Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during a keynote this month at the University of Central Florida. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said, as boos erupted, to her surprise. She turned around to ask those behind her, "What happened?" "OK, I struck a chord. May I finish?" said Caulfield, who is vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Development Company in Orlando. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," she said, prompting cheers. "And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand," she said to more jeering. A similar response met music executive Scott Borchetta when he spoke to the graduating class of Middle Tennessee State University about how AI is shaping the music industry. "AI is rewriting production as we sit here," said Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, as the students in caps and gowns booed. "I know it. Deal with it ... Do something about it. It's a tool. Make it work for you." Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops. The advice didn't land well with students like Malone, who said the former Google executive's speech was more self-serving than inspirational. "It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever," said Malone, noting that the choice of Schmidt as keynote speaker had also been controversial because his name appears in the Epstein files. "Everybody I was sitting by was really hooting and hollering about that, yelling, 'Epstein files! Epstein files!'" Simply appearing in the Epstein files doesn't implicate wrongdoing, and a spokesperson for Schmidt, Matthew Hiltzik, downplayed any ties between them, saying Schmidt declined a meeting with the disgraced financier and had "nothing to do with him." Part of the backlash from graduating students stems from the dismal job market they're entering. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years. Sami Wargo just graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where an AI expert was the undergraduate commencement speaker despite a student petition demanding that the school find someone else. "Given how AI has become an increasing threat towards our jobs, especially for our graduating class, we thought it was a little bit tone deaf," said Wargo, who majored in digital media and minored in advertising. Chris Duffey, an AI evangelist at Adobe who recently used AI to "co-author" a book titled "Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence," took the stage anyway. "Innovation," he told the students, "will reveal what can be done, but only you can decide what should be done." Wargo said she joined other students around her in booing his message. The 21-year-old has applied for around 30 jobs but hasn't landed one yet. Many of the job descriptions say applicants must "collaborate with AI," but "I don't know what that means," she said, noting that most of her classes banned her from using AI. Having to be reminded of all the uncertainty at their graduation, she said, was another "little dent in what was supposed to be a celebratory day." ___

The AI bots are coming and the young are booing, not applauding

LONDON, May 20 (Reuters) - The AI revolution is here and the boos are getting louder. As artificial intelligence reshapes industries and markets around the world, a sense of dread is deepening among young "digital natives" now entering the workforce, fearful of the impact on jobs and daily life as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini become household names. In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the impact of AI would be "larger, faster, and more consequential" than anything before. "It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have," he said as boos rang out even as he addressed anxieties about job security and an uncertain future. How real those fears are was on show in an announcement by Standard Chartered on Tuesday that it will cut over 7,000 jobs and replace "lower-value human capital" with AI. Many tech firms are also cutting staff, citing AI. Meta, which is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to train its AI model, is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce globally starting this month. Amazon.com has axed some 30,000 corporate jobs in recent months as it pushes AI and efficiency, while in February fintech firm Block cut nearly half its staff. The Iran war is also softening hiring. Schmidt acknowledged the young generation's fears and called them "rational," but just like the current top executives he painted the change and disruption AI was bringing as something inevitable that everyone needed to adapt to. GEN Z: ANGRIER AND MORE ANXIOUS ABOUT AI However, even as CEOs embrace AI, there have been signs of pushback: from Chinese courts, to unions at South Korean carmakers, Hollywood scriptwriters and India's film industry. And perhaps the clearest sign of discomfort with the vision of the world offered by tech companies is the rising discontent among America's youth. An April report from Gallup showed that a rising number of Generation Z - those born between 1997 and 2012 - were anxious or angry about AI, while those who said they were hopeful or excited by it had fallen sharply compared with a year earlier. Nearly half of respondents said the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, while 15% said it was a net positive, a much bleaker view than a year ago. Most recognized the need to be AI-savvy but said it hindered deeper learning and creativity. "Negative emotions have intensified over the past year," the report's authors wrote and noted that usage was starting to plateau. "Young adults in the workforce are significantly more likely to view AI as a risk than a benefit." The data did show that positive views of AI increased with the level of usage and decreased amongst those who used it less. Schmidt's frosty reception followed other recent shows of anger at AI. At the University of Central Florida on May 8, a real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was similarly heckled and booed over a commencement speech on AI. "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," she said as boos rang out, catching her off guard. "What happened? OK, I struck a chord... Only a few years ago AI was not a factor in our lives." The room burst out in cheers. (Reporting by Adam JourdanEditing by Tomasz Janowski)